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Michael Moore's New Film Leaked To BitTorrent
Jared writes "Michael Moore was afraid the Feds might sieze his new documentary Sicko, a scathing indictment of the US health-care system, because part of it was filmed in Cuba despite the US embargo. So he stashed a copy of the film in Canada just to be safe. He might as well not have bothered — the film has shown up on BitTorrent and P2P networks everywhere. So it's safe now."
Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind the bans on cuba. There are much nastier places that people are allowed to deal with. I always get a kick living in vancouver because anywhere there might be american tourists, there is usually a big sign saying "cuban cigars".
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
He achieves the top objectives of a film maker, to get the audience to think about the topic and discuss it. Whether it is right or wrong is optional.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Whatever you make of MM, the point he makes in this movie is both a profound and necessary wake-up call. It's the kind of movie you don't even need to have an open mind to appreciate. If you're still dubious about state-funded healthcare then this should open your mind for you.
How simple minded do you have to be to assume that hating Michael Moore equals loving Bush?
...and Michael Moore is one of the few people with enough influence who has the sense to keep harping on it. I just saw Sicko (via bittorrent) and it was very good.
Of course as a nation we really are insane; most people still don't see the problem with putting the richest corporations in charge of absolutely everything and calling it "freedom".
Caveat Utilitor
Our problems do not come from a "failure" to socialize medicine. When I was up in Canada, the news was that brain scanners were mostly going to places with powerful politicians. Quebec got an unfair share. Money was disappearing for political reasons. Over in the UK, people are being sent to France for surgery because they'd die on the waiting lists if they didn't go. Here in the USA we install brain scanners (lots of them too) where there will be patients and we don't die on waiting lists for anything other than an organ transplant -- and that only because we made it illegal to pay the dead person's estate.
Our real problems are:
Some of these problems are not really solvable. Economics is what it is, people like new technology, and nobody wants to see their little children die. The lawyers have some mighty lobbiests, but a change would at least be theoretically possible. The same goes for the co-pay insurance system, which could be replaced by a sliding scale or percentage system. (example insurance fix: the patient's payment must increase by at least 10 cents for every dollar of the treatment cost up to "$200 for $2000", then by 1 cent per dollar thereafter)
Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us.
The fact that Bush has often misled the american people does not prove that Michael Moore is telling the truth.
There is no such thing as the free market, because access to every market is controlled by special interest gatekeepers. If you don't believe me, just try visiting the NYSE and buying some shares directly. Free market think tanks are as prone to special interest pleading as anybody else - unless you really believe, say, that the Cato Institute takes money from the oil and tobacco industries and is totally uninfluenced by it.
And here in the UK, we have had to move away from the medical profession being allowed to regulate itself as a result of numerous scandals. Although the great majority of physicians are doubtless more altruistic than the majority of society, it's been said that trade unions are like dishwater - the scum rises to the top.
I think that experience in Canada, the UK and most of Europe shows that you must be able to vote for the people that control the health care system, because there are too many ethical, special interest, and economic factors to be left to people acting blindly in their own interests. Adam Smith never foresaw a world of mega-corporations, and his understanding of capitalism was a long way short of that of Marx.
Pining for the fjords
Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us.
Because when someone disagrees with a liar they are automatically telling the truth.
For example, I too think Bush is a liar. Also, your hair is on fire.
Bush, Rush, Coulter etc. vs Clinton, Moore, Franken, etc... it's the circus part of the bread and circus formula. Their goal is to really change very little but get you all worked up about it in the process.
"Because we all know the President Bush tells the truth and would never mislead us."
Right, so piling on more mistruths is totally justified. I feel full of insight, now.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Michael Moore is a pretentious hack. Every time I want to see his smirking face like he's teaching the world a thing or two I want to gouge my eyes out.
Every time I hear Ann Coulter talk about the liberal media bias I want to light something on fire and throw myself in it.
So which am I, fucktard GP? Right or Wrong? Left or Right?
I'm a goddamn self-critical thinking American who realizes we've fucked up but also realizes that distorting the truth in a documentary is probably the worst thing you could ever do for the industry. You want to present an opinion - cool, say it's your fucking opinion. But saying right is left and the sky is actually a pretty shade of lime and presenting that as not coming from you, but coming from facts is the lowest thing you could do in documentary journalism. It's as bad as any (insert ideology) media bias and worse for the hard-working true blue documentarians who want to present both sides of an issue but are shown that doing that isn't sexy enough, that they won't get the respect they so richly deserved by allowing both sides to speak and letting the audience decide, or by presenting their opinion and letting the audience decide whether it's right or wrong.
Moore makes me as sad and pissed off for my America as any other partisan lobby-owned political hack.
Quid-pro-quo, ne?
Stay the fuck out of our world, and we'll stay out of your politics.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Yeah, sure, except US politics affects the rest of the world. US politics is everybody's politics.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
I remember scene in Bowling for Columbine when he stated people in Toronto don't lock their doors. This is an exaggeration to put it mildly.
Well maybe you should watch it again, or at all: he never said canadians never locked their door. What he showed was that, usually, in small town Canada, people didn't lock themselves *inside*. You see him walking up to a porch, pushing an unlocked door and asking "is there anyone in here?", and the lady of the house comes, surprised but not frightened.
Here's the thing about Michael Moore: he's criticized for movies he didn't make, and things he never said. I believe it's called "strawman".
Hey, we can keep picking countries, and inevitably all of them will have tradeoffs in order to facilitate universal healthcare. Right now, though, I'm willing to argue that a non-optimal distribution of MRI devices, in an age where travelling hundreds of miles is commonplace (though certainly not convenient), is less of a concern than restricting the devices only to a certain portion of the market. (That is, those who'll pay.) I fail to see the difference between the two in principle: not everyone gets low-cost access (in economic terms) to the MRI device. It's just that the cost of travel is easier, these days, to pay.
Florida is a "swing state" with many cuban voters. They left cuba for a reason and that reason is that they hate Castro. So much so that they would rather see the family and friends they left behind live in poverty than give any legitimacy to Cuba by trading with them. So any party that would get rid of the idiotic embargo (China is a preferred trade partner for crying out loud!) loses the Cuban vote in Florida and thus lose any election.
THAT is why the embargo is still in place.
We would, if you could stay the "frak" out of our business.
USA still has a lot of international say and use it in a not so civilized way at times.
Stop kidnapping our citizens and send them to Guantanamo for no good reason.
Stop keeping "secret" prisons in our countries.
Stop your european missile shield program.
Stop invading souvreign countries to protect american profit interests.
Stop pushing SW-patents and other bad ideas onto the rest of the world.
Stop being the top polluter in the world.
etc...
Your politics affect us, and as long as that's the case, we really can't stay the "frak" out of your politics.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Well, fortunately, this is not a Politically-based documentary. Watch the movie and you'll see it takes swings at both Republicans and Democrats without holding his punches. It's about a system that is broken, and needs to be fixed somehow.
It's a very good movie, you should definitely watch it. even if it's not 100% accurate, it still brings up a shitload of valid points that Americans should definitely think about.
If Bush's businesses were funded by the Saudis, that may matter. If prominent Saudis (related to Bin Laden, no less) were flown out of the country without being interviewed by the FBI when the rest of the non-military planes were grounded, that may matter. If the Saudi ambassador is so close to the Bushes that he has a pet name and is considered a close personal friend, that may matter. If Cheney still owns stock in Haliburton and stands to make money off of it when he steps out of office, that may matter.
I've seen concerted efforts to discredit Moore, and they always hinge on a different interpretation of the facts, not catching him in an outright falsehood. The facts he puts on the table need to be on the table, and Fox sure as hell isn't going to put them there. If his facts are correct and the facts indicate that something was awry, then we needed to look at that. We chose not to. We allowed cries of "he's biased!" to trump the question of "are his facts correct and what conclusion do they lead to?" Even if smoking guns can't be found, there were a lot of things brought to light by his movie that looked fishy as hell.
If you want to see bias, look at an Ann Coulter book. At least Moore's references check out.
Most countries with universal health care do not have "socialised" health care.
France, Germany, etc, have "socialised" health insurance.
Care itself is mostly private. Doctors, dentists, pharmacists have private practices. A majority of hospitals are state-run, but there are plenty of private hospitals, too.
You are free to go to any doctor you want.
Look, I'm actually more to the left than he is, as usually is the case in Europe. What by US standards counts as "conservative" and "liberal", in most of continental Europe would pass for "ultra-conservative" and "conservative". Yeah, we're a bunch of commie mutant traitors like that ;)
I even agree with some of his points. Well, dunno about this particular movie, but I ended up buying a couple of his books because the back cover said they were "hilarious." (Ooer. Americans must be quite a cheerful and fun loving folk, if even that kind of bitter whine counts as "hilarious".)
That said, his endless "auugh, the government is out to get me" is starting to look stupid already, for a start. Look, if the government wanted to silence him, he'd be silent already. If America was the kind of fascist oligarchy that he always describes, he probably wouldn't even be alive at this point, or at least someone would have framed him for something already and sent him to a maximum security jail.
This is just yet another such publicity stunt, for conspiracy theorists. How about waiting until the government actually does something about it, before "leaking" the movie? Or if he wants to distribute it via P2P, fine, that's a mighty fine way to distribute your works, really. But it's just a choice of distribution, not some great act of resistance against fascism.
Hyperbole (like metaphors, similes, and everything else) is like a condiment in food. If half your dish is salt or pepper, you probably overdid it. Same here. Not only it makes his bitter whine sound even more bitter, it doesn't even serve his purposes that well, since you never know what's a genuine assessment and what's another of his over-the-top hyperboles. It's like the boy who cried wolf: by the time you've described something as a totalitarian plot for the 1000'th time, noone (sane) takes it seriously any more.
Such ego-stroking stunts are just that kind of bad hyperbole. Yes, probably some people above would dislike his point, but some might even agree with him. Either way, he's _not_ going to end up with the Gestapo on his doorstep and with the SS burning his movies and book, either.
More importantly, there are always two sides to each issues. There's rarely a free meal: to get X you give up some Y, or viceversa. And neither extreme is an utopia, so you have to figure out your own least crappy compromise among all possible crappy compromises. Which is why there's a political debate and more than one party and platform. One thinks that it's totally worth giving up X to get more Y, one thinks the opposite, one thinks the balance is good enough as it is, one wants to give up both X and Y to gain Z, and yet another one runs around with pencils up its nose and thinks it's an airplane.
The reason why the government does X instead of Y, may not always be the best, may not always even be honest, but aren't always "let's oppress someone for the fun of it either" either. Whether it's about health care or letting the Bin Laden family fly away after 9/11, there are real issues ranging from costs to international relations to ideology behind those choices. And by ideology I mean "what we think is best for the economy", not just "let's be neo-conservative because the conspiracy told us to". Those ideas might well be wrong (everyone can't be right at the same time, or you wouldn't need more than one party), but painting one side with the broad brush of "auugh, they're all bought by their industrialist friends and trying to silence me" is just an ad-hominem.
Stances basically saying "my version is by definition perfect, and everyone else is a fascist peddling crooked crap solutions" aren't really doing anyone any good.
Or at least I hope it's hyperbole, because otherwise he'd have to be paranoid schizophrenic to actually believe all that. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It's probably hyperbole.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Okay, this is a criticism that I have a real hard time getting behind, because the implicit assumption that it requires is that everyone is simply too stupid to be trusted understanding that in a two-hour film, not every nuance or exception to a comment need be expressed aloud. Documentarians should be able to make the basic assumption that people don't turn off their brains while watching.
To put it mildly, you would have to be a fscking idiot to believe that *nobody* in Toronto locks their doors. You know that. I know that. Michael Moore knows that. Michael Moore also has only 120 miuntes to say everything he wants to say, and so he can generalize to a point where he *should* feel comfortable with assuming the audience knows that he is talking about trends rather than a hard law of behavior. Anybody with a reasonably functional mind would come away from that scene under the impression that Moore is making the point that Torontoans care less about locking their doors when home than Americans, who are by-and-large both the subject and audience of the film. That assertion anecdotally and for me experientially also seems eminently correct. If he were forced to qualify every statement to absolute precision, he wouldn't be able to say anything interesting or thought-provoking. Neither would anyone else.
I have my own criticsms of M. Moore, and they tend towards my perception that he uses manipulative tactics too often, I imagine intended to elicit sympathy through emotional appeals of pity or indignation, but for me it is simply distracting and wearying. For example, I thought that much of Bowling for Columbine was interesting and thought-provoking, but I hated the part where he badgered poor Mr. Heston, particularly the part with the photograph. Similarly, in F9/11, the end part with the mother wailing and gnashing her teeth was an off-key ending that marred his larger points with cheap and exploitative melodrama.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Sarcasm aside, yeah, that's right. Texts (both typed and film) have minimum entry levels for knowledge-base, experiences, and intelligence. When a person is speaking or writing, often he or she has to just make a basic assumption that someone is minimally intelligent, informed, capable of critical thought, etc., and write off those that don't. Behind every statement of any worth is a trove of unspoken hypotheses and assumptions. Requiring that they be spelled out for the uninformed and the stupid is ridiculous and unfair unless the text is intended for those specific audiences.
And he can't say "whatever he wants" in the sense that you mean. He just doesn't have to spell out his points as if we were all born yesterday, and in that narrow sense he can take liberties with the expected intelligence of his audience.
So if membership in the "Cool kids club" is typified by being able to think even cursorily about what is being presented instead of being a passive receptacle for whatever you happen to view, that's the one I want to be in. Don't you?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
I'm tired of all of this crap about Moore's documentaries being nothing but lies. His documentaries are heavily biased against the Bush administration and the direction of the country, but, for the most part, his facts are pretty accurate. This new documentary was created to point out how bad the national health care situation is currently. His using Cuba to demonstrate national health care shows his bias, but it doesn't make his point less accurate or factual. Health care in this country is screwed up. When needing medical care could mean years, or even decades of extreme debt, even when you have "insurance" (if it can be called that with the crap these companies pull), we have an issue.
I'm tired of the ad hominem attacks here. If you disagree with the man, fine. If you don't want to watch the movie, fine. But if you want to disagree with him as vocally as many do here, counter his facts, stop the BS and petty name calling.
Clones are people two.
For me, I don't see him as lying, I see him as bending the truth.
I've watched this movie, and he's glossed over the fact that our (the UK) NHS infrastructure is a bit shoddy. Sure, it's one of the best in the world, but it's a giant money hole.
Also, it appears to be an advert for Clinton. Would have been nice to see this party-neutral. Ah well.
If you ignore the partisan politics, this is a fantastic film with one important message: Societies are not judged by how they treat their heroes, but how they treat the bottom rung. Only with universal healthcare, free at the point of need (that's need, not want - no free boobjobs, obviously) can the US elevate it's status as one of the worst infant mortality rates, poor general health and positively narcissistic health corporation which have done nothing but bolster corporate profits.
The US is a fantastic place, but I'd never want to live in a country that didn't care about everyone - regardless of whether they're a billionaire or a meth-addict in dire straits.
The fact that Bush has often misled the american people does not prove that Michael Moore is telling the truth. The difference between Bush and Moore, is that Bush maintains he is telling the truth, even when the facts suggest otherwise. Moore claims only to give an opinion, and is frequently on record as saying his movies are 'op-ed pieces'.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military. Why is it that a government-run firefighting system can be trusted to rescue people from a burning building, but somehow government-run healthcare can't be trusted to treat them? Are firefighter EMTs worse at their job than hospital EMTs?
And just look at our military. Is it wasteful? Without a doubt. But does it have the tradeoffs that Canadian/European militaries have? Not by a long shot. So why should government-run health care in America automatically be a disaster? Why should we even expect to have to make the same tradeoffs that other nations make? This is America ffs; we've got a ridiculously large national ego. If Canucks and Euros can make it work, why the hell wouldn't we be able to do it better?
It seems to me that we should expect American government-run health care would still be the best on the planet.
And last I checked, I'm already paying about twice as much for less healthcare today than a decade ago when our nation last talked about healthcare. Private healthcare clearly hasn't protected us from massive increases in costs and cutbacks in service.
So why again, are we defending a system that's built to incentivize denial of service? Why again are we defending a system that is clearly incompatible with free-market assumptions? (Healthcare is not a good the consumer can walk away from, so the consumer will always lose.)
I simply don't see how it is that American government-run police, firefighting, emergency response, and national defense can be trusted -- can be the best in the world at what they do -- but government-run healthcare is still a boogeyman.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
But you're assuming that these topics are simple, kindergarten, black-and-white issues. It's like you're saying, "A journalist would never present 2+2=4 AND 2+2=5 in the same light." Well duh... of course he wouldn't. But this isn't kindergarten, and these questions don't have easy answers. That's why it's the journalists job to present ALL of the facts (even the ones that don't support his personal opinion) and let the viewer draw their own conclusion.
Take the topic of enacting socialized medicine in the US. Does it suck that so many people don't have health care? I think so. Would it suck if the gov't took more of my money to pay for someone else to have an operation? I think so. Do people get into situations sometimes where they need help (i.e. free medical care). I think so. Will people take advantage of the system by needlessly going to the doctor all of the time just because they know it's going to be free? I think so. Will it be a benefit to the millions of Americans who have no health care coverage? I think so. Will it be a detriment to the other millions of Americans who already have quality health care at a low cost through their employers or other means? I think so. Are there positives? Of course. Are there negatives? Of course. And the journalist should present all of them.
You can't just focus on the side that makes your case look good... you can't just parade the "lost causes" in front of the camera and say, "Socialized medicine will fix this". You have to point out the things that it will break as well. For every person who will go from getting no coverage to getting some coverage, you have to point out the people who will go from getting fast, quality coverage to getting slow, lesser quality coverage (I should know... I'm Canadian by birth, and my brother was on a waiting list for over 9 months for a simple operation... the last surgery I needed --now that I'm in the US-- required about a two week wait). For every person who can't afford coverage and will get it for free, you'll have to point out all of the people who _can_ afford it and are getting it for a very good price, who will end up losing more money in taxes than what it costs them right now (My wife, for example, gets coverage through her work for free... I get it for a very low cost through my work... if our taxes went up to pay for this, we'd both end up on the losing-side --financially and in the quality of the coverage).
The most important thing to remember in this debate is that you're talking about forcing the entire nation into doing something, whether they agree with it or not. The same goes for any of these other major debates. And when you're talking about doing something like that, you can't play games with the "facts". We need to hear it all.
WATYF
The primary criticism of the Bush "prosperity" is that the economic growth is being driven primarily by firms outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas. So, the bulk of the wealth that is being created is going to the already very wealthy, while the middle class is exchanging their previous high-paying jobs for lower paying jobs. Most of the jobs being created are low-paying service sector jobs.
Yes, there is widespread speculation that a recession is coming, fueled mainly by the crisis in the housing market, but people speculate about the market all the time. This speculation is coming from economists in general, and is certainly not limited to the left wing.
Also, the Film Actors Guild (FAG) was a fictional organization in the film "Team America: World Police". The acronym is part of the humor. So, while your point of view is legitimate, you may want to research your assertions before throwing bile at fictional entities.
Also, while Moore undoubtedly plays up certain aspects of his films for entertainment value and to prove his point, he does often bring up quite a few good points that are solidly based on fact. To ignore a point of view out of hand merely because it comes from a source you find distasteful is closed-minded.
In Canada it basicaly works like this: if you can afford it, you pay to use an American MRI machine, as well as paying your travel costs to get over the border. If you CAN'T afford it, you wait until a Canadian machine opens up, and pray you don't die in the meantime. I'm not sure how that's any better than the US system.
That's pretty similar to the US system:
If you can afford it, you pay to use the American MRI machine.
Except for the part about waiting for a Canadian machine to open up if you can't afford that.
Here in the US, if you can't afford it, you just wait to die.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.